Overview
In Obeah and Other Powers, historians and anthropologists consider how marginalized spiritual traditions--such as obeah, Vodou, and Santeria--have been understood and represented across the Caribbean since the seventeenth century. In essays focused on Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the wider Anglophone Caribbean, the contributors explore the fields of power within which Caribbean religions have been produced, modified, appropriated, and policed. The other powers of the book's title have helped to shape, or attempted to curtail, Caribbean religions and healing practices. These powers include those of capital and colonialism; of states that criminalize some practices and legitimize others; of occupying armies that rewrite constitutions and reorient economies; of writers, filmmakers, and scholars who represent Caribbean practices both to those with little knowledge of the region and to those who live there; and, not least, of the millions of people in the Caribbean whose relationships with one another, as well as with capital and the state, have long been mediated and experienced through religious formations and discourses.
Contributors. Kenneth Bilby, Erna Brodber, Alejandra Bronfman, Elizabeth Cooper, Maarit Forde, Stephan Palmie, Diana Paton, Alasdair Pettinger, Lara Putnam, Karen Richman, Raquel Romberg, John Savage, Katherine Smith
Full Product Details
Author: Diana Paton (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) ,
Maarit Forde
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9786613582430
ISBN 10: 6613582433
Pages: 373
Publication Date: 13 April 2012
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Electronic book text
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
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Reviews
Obeah and Other Powers is an excellent and welcome contribution to scholarship on Caribbean religions. Too few works explicitly address the three themes taken up in this collection: the significance of state power in shaping the environment in which Caribbean religions were practiced, the role of practitioners in shaping their religious traditions, and the role of mobility and the permeability of borders in shaping the definitions and interpretations of obeah, Vodou, Santeria, and Candomble. This last premise enables the contributors to analyze these religions in conjunction with one another and as overlapping, rather than separate, phenomena. --Aisha Khan, author of Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad
